Monday, June 09, 2003

The WMD Scoreboard. Meme Cauldron's scoreboard is making me laugh.  Good point! Here's the thing: Republican reaction to Clinton's lies about a blowjob: Impeachment.  Republican reaction to Bush's lies about WMD: Cheering!  Maybe "lies" is too strong a word -- so far.  The jury is definitely out. For the sake of declining American credibility in the world, I hope Bush is right, and something, somewhere, gets found.  I hope it's locked up in nice, safe containers.  Of course, given that Saddam Hussein didn't use WMD as his reign was being destroyed may be a fairly good indicator that it was never "45 minutes away" from being used, as the Brits claimed. We see grumblings from intelligence analysts that their "possibles" and "probables" were turned into "definites" by the administration.  We all know what happened.  The Bush adminstration performed the same spin on intelligence data as they do on just about every other piece of information that passes through them.  This is par for the course for standard political, domestic issues.  We all expect it and would be surprised if it didn't happen. The difference is that the spinning here was used to start a war.  The resolutions Congress passed were to defend against a WMD threat, not to have a regime change for regime-change's sake.  Right now it all looks like a lie.  What else can you call telling the Congress something that you know will get you the resolution you want, but also knowing that it basically isn't true?  The executive branch is supposed to be finding a way to justify war, however possible. This is a disturbing trend. Ashcroft's Department of Justice makes no apology for using all available remedies in its pursuit of terror and suspects.  The human cost of trampling on so many individuals, for no reason, doesn't even register with him. Similarly, Bush's administration makes no apology for twisting available facts to suit its policies, to bend the middle east to its will.  Bush has said that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "are", is.  Doesn't it? 2:18:03 PM    comment []

Defeating DDOS. It's time for IRC to go, or to be modified.  The very vast majority of DDOS attacks are coordinated through the IRC networks; bots insert themselves in and wait for commands.  The anonymity afforded by IRC is something that we really can't afford to let continue.  Yes, it's nice that IRC is out there, blah blah blah.  And I'm sure that there's a lot of work that gets done through IRC channels.  There's also a lot of harm that gets done. Unless some way can be found to implement some form of accountability within the IRC space, I think that ISPs should simply start filtering out all IRC traffic.  DDOS IRC bots running on someone's home machine can't respond to commands that never reach it.  This will force the bots to use some other technique. Of course, the networks that are set up by P2P systems like Kazaa are also a perfect mechanism for finding and discovering trojan peers running on other systems. Basically you set yourself up as a trojan, then hook yourself into Kazaa's network just enough to get lists of other machines.  You then probe those machines directly, trying to find trojans running on them.  When you discover one running, the two trojans exchange lists of compromised machines.  You can even insert yourself into the Kazaa sharing directory, etc. etc. These information-sharing trojans are the real nemesis we'll have to face in the future.  They'll be capable of hiding themselves, be polymorphic, implement their own P2P communications mechanisms, and generally be a huge pain in the ass for anyone who gets one. Strong Anti-Virus is the only thing that will help us. That, and ring-based security in our operating systems.  Since we're probably not going to see that in my lifetime, I should stop whining about it. 11:57:33 AM    comment []

Naked Objects. Stuart Halloway, and a lot of other people, think they're pretty interesting.  So do I!  My feeling is that the future will be something like Naked Objects...it's a strong step in the right direction.  I have been thinking for a long time about fluid user interfaces.  Basically you want the interface to adapt itself automatically to the data.  Swing's various data models are a step in the right direction -- you have many different kinds of controls that can attach themselves to common data models. XUL goes further -- it says that there is a common data format (RDF), and all the controls know how to assemble themselves from that. I am not sure that RDF is the idea model for this kind of thing.  Having done some work with tuple spaces and CLIPS-style fact systems, I'd have to say that the facts are definitely the way to go.  They're just more flexible, but the big win is clearly being able to run rules against all that stuff, in a very rigorous way.  The rule systems can analyze the kinds of information present and actually synthesize user interface code on the fly. The thing to remember about synthesized user interfaces is that the exceptions must be handled.  You need to provide an extension mechanism that allows a developer to get in the special sauce.  The future will be made of partial automated interfaces, together with custom stuff.  This is just like the component model of today -- you use the components where you can, and then you extend as necessary to get the precise behavior you want. 10:54:28 AM    comment []